Comic for Thursday, April 21st

Been hard to find the time to catch back up, and got a little behind last weekend.

In the perfect world I plan for, I’d found a way to expound more on comic-world politics by this point, unfortunately, that hasn’t really happened. While Malsa and Arpon are among the current technological and economic focal points of the world, they are not the traditional world powers; Orin, however, is/was one. Their currently place in the world is somewhat more dubious as the long standing conflicts are currently mostly in the smoldering state, and the former big three do not have the economic power they used to with international corporations (many part of PACT) taking the primary economic spotlight of the new world.

Somehow I don’t think Rovak would enjoy being retrieved by Mir. I also doubt he views himself as a relic. Or, for that matter, a barbarian.

Though I suppose her stipulation of ‘not particularly valuable’ is some sort of grudging acknowledgement?

Discussion (11) ¬

I’m interested in the fact that the entity self-identifying as “Rovak Stas” is a pale, medium-blonde with red eyes, but aside from the eye color appears typically “human”.
I’ll confess that I intially read “Orish”, as “OrKish”, which triggered my suspicion that perhaps the user of the nomonym wasn’t it’s owner.

I am intrigued by Mir’s order to quote, “retrieve” the warmage. (Capture him… alive…? Will a dead body still work for her purposes?) I have to wonder what she plans to do with him. But, at this point, I would guess that she wants to analyze (copy?) his magic a bit and/or Frankenstein his magical abilities into a new Ila-style Prototype.

I am intrigued enough by Rovak to wish I had a Fu Manchu beard to stroke thoughtfully. I had originally thought he was a mage but then his little speech about immortality made me wonder if he was some kind of demi-god. Everybody here is talking about him as a thing rather than a person and as a big fan of the precocious (and sorta psycho) Ila and Muim I think they need to suffer for their prejudice.

Also Mir reminds me of several ex-bosses so she needs to keep failing just because.

I’d wondered how war worked with magic. Sounds like I have part of my answer if there is something called a warmage. Though from the way Rovak is talked about, it seems like that means something specific (probably a type of cyborg from prior speculation).

I like how the robot/prototype behind Mir avoids being hit by her gesturing, it clearly does react at least somewhat to it’s surroundings.

I still don’t have a clear understanding of what an eidos key is. However, why must Mir use her own eidos to give Ila magic? Couldn’t she, somehow, use someone else’s eidos? Perhaps a ‘volunteer’ from her research staff? Or, maybe, some poor schmuck that they captured or tricked?

It’s worth noting that the ‘eidos key’ is a theoretical term in the comic; of the people we’ve seen talk about it, none of them could tell you what it actually is.

How one gains or loses something like that is, generally speaking, unknown. The speculation of if Mir has one or somehow ‘used it’ to make Ila or ‘lost it’ when she started become decided less human looking was brought up by board members back here; the extent to which they are any form of authority, though, is up for debate.

The closest thing to an explanation we have yet was Peter talking about at it one point, where he noted that some view it as a soul or spirit, but that he speculated it was merely a part of the human subconscious that wasn’t understood yet.

While I can’t see Mir necessarily using herself for parts (when, as you note, she’s got so many spare donors sitting around 😉 ), it’s clear that she has on some level modified or experimented on herself; how human she is at this point is up for some debate; if her brain for example isn’t out-of-the-box human, it’s quite possible that she wouldn’t be able to translate magic calculations onto reality (the stated effect of the ‘eidos key’) unless she actually does know what it is and how to make something possessing that ability.